Reading at home

Support their reading

• Help your child to find suitable material to read online for a topic of interest at school.
• Talk to your child about what they have been reading online. What have they learnt? What questions do they still have? How do they know the information is reliable?
• Talk to your child’s teacher about available books and resources that relate to your child’s interests.
• Read through your child’s homework tasks and questions together and talk about what they are planning to do to finish the homework.
• Play video games and board games as a family. Increase the challenge – it really helps children’s learning.

Read together

• Read your child a children’s novel that they are interested in – try 1 or 2 chapters each day.
• Get your child to listen to younger siblings doing their reading homework (this is a good chance for them to practise some of their own reading skills).
• You can remind them about pausing while the younger child thinks about a word they don’t know, giving them help to sound out the word, checking it makes sense, and giving them praise for their reading.
• Have books, magazines, comics, online articles and other information available for everyone in your family to read on topics that interest your child, for example, skateboarding, surfing, fashion.
• Listen together to audiobooks of your child’s favourite stories, books and songs.

Hunt out things to read

• Take a trip to the library and help your child to find books, audiobooks and magazines that they will enjoy reading – for example, books about their favourite musician, movie star, sports celebrity or other role model.
• Find books, magazines, websites or videos that tell stories about who your child is and where they have come from.
• Read and talk about advertising signs you see – talk about how the company decided on the words and the design, and who they are trying to appeal to with the advertising.
• Use a map to find directions for a trip you are going on or follow the journeys of people on travel and adventure programmes.
• Get some instruction books from the library on how to plan for and make food, gifts, or toys, for family birthdays, Matariki or other culturally significant events. Work through the instructions with your child.
• Find some recipes together that your child might like to cook for a family treat. Be there to help your child as they read through the recipe, get all the ingredients and create the final result.

Writing at home

Write for a reason

Help your child to:

• write a letter or an email to their teacher or principal, local council or their favourite influencer, sharing your child’s opinion on a topic of interest
• start a blog and get your child to record thoughts about their day to share with their friends and family
• write a proverb, family motto or pepeha and illustrate it with online images or photos
• develop a spreadsheet to record the progress of your child’s sports team or kapa haka group (or one they follow), including games played, performances given, penalties, scores, player/performer of the day
• start a writing journal to record trips and weekend activities
• take some photos and write a picture book for a younger child using the photos
• write a comic using drawings, or pictures to present an idea or story
• make some birthday cards, thank you notes or letters to friends and family.

Make writing fun

Get together with your child to:

• play strategy games and do word puzzles like word search puzzles and crosswords – you can find these online
• make the weekly shopping list using supermarket flyers or supermarket website and find all the bargains and savings to fit the budget
• write some descriptions for items you may wish to sell online
• find out about some of your family history (whakapapa) and/or family stories (pakiwaitara) and record these stories to share with other whānau | family members.

Talk about your child’s writing

• Ask them about a piece of writing they are doing at school and/or for their homework.
• Tell them about some writing you are currently doing – a letter, a poem, a list for the holidays, a scrapbook, something you are doing for work or study.
• Help them to use an online dictionaries and thesaurus.

Maths at home

Have fun with numbers, shapes, games, and patterns

Help your child:

• find and connect numbers around your home and on family outings, for example, read the odometer on the car to see how many kilometres the car can go on a tank of petrol. Get them to note how much it costs to refill, then work out how much it costs per kilometre
• talk about sales in town – 15% off, 33% off, 20% off, half price. Look for the best value. What would the price of the item be after the discount? Is it better to buy two items and get one free or get 25% off the price of the items?
• budget pocket money and/or plan ahead to open a savings account or reach a savings target. Talk about earning interest. Calculate what interest would be earned using different savings schemes
• work out the amount of fabric needed to make a piece of clothing – how many square metres is needed?
• talk about goals and plan ahead to budget for items for themselves or for others
• do complicated number puzzles.

Use easy, everyday activities

Involve your child in:

• planning to help make a dish or a full meal for the family or even a community event at the hall or marae – working out the cost of making it at home versus buying it already made, planning the preparation and cooking time – and focus on the ingredients and the amounts of fat and sugar, too
• planning what proportion of their own, or their brother’s and sister’s, time should be spent on tasks (like homework, sleep, TV, sport, kapa haka) to make sure there’s time left for fun and family
• watching documentaries or videos online, which are full of facts and information using mathematics
• reading online articles or advertisements featuring graphs or tables.

For wet afternoons/school holidays/weekends

Get together with your child and:

• play games – find online games, card games or board games that use strategy
• calculate the chance of their favourite team winning a tournament. Investigate how many points they need and work out what their competitors need as well
• play outdoor games – skateboarding, frisbee, touch rugby, kilikiti, cricket, soccer, pétanque, netball
• plan and perform a rap, dance or waiata a ringa and draw up the outline of the dance steps on graph paper
• make a present or gift for someone using a scrapbook, kōwhaiwhai, quilting, doing tivaevae, collage, painting, carving, knitting, sewing or carpentry
• plan for when they have saved $10/$20/$30. What would be the best use of that money for a day out?
• draw a Lego structure from front, side, back and top views, break it up, and have your child use your drawings to recreate the structure.

Download the Year 8 resources